Young Evangelicals for Huck

NYT reports that young Evangelicals are getting excited about Huckabee, to the chagrin of the old guard. Two young Evangelical adults, Brett and Alex Harris, have founded a pretty great online site called Huck's Army, to network grassroots Huckabee supporters:

They say they like Mr. Huckabee for the same reason many of their elders do not: “He reaches outside the normal Republican box,” Brett Harris said in an interview from his home near Portland, Ore.

The brothers fell for Mr. Huckabee last August when they saw him draw applause on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” for explaining that he believed in a Christian obligation to care for prenatal “life” and also education, health care, jobs and other aspects of “life.” “It is a new kind of evangelical conservative position,” Brett Harris said. Alex Harris added, “And we are not going to have to be embarrassed about him.”

Mr. Huckabee, who was a Southern Baptist minister before serving as governor of Arkansas, is the only candidate in the presidential race who identifies himself as an evangelical. But instead of uniting conservative Christians, his candidacy is threatening to drive a wedge into the movement, potentially dividing its best-known national leaders from part of their base and upending assumptions that have held the right wing together for the last 30 years.

His singular style — Christian traditionalism and the common-man populism of William Jennings Bryan, leavened by an affinity for bass guitar and late-night comedy shows — has energized many young and working-class evangelicals. Their support helped his shoestring campaign come from nowhere to win the Iowa Republican caucus and join the front-runners in Michigan, South Carolina and national polls.

And Mr. Huckabee has done it without the backing of, and even over the opposition of, the movement’s most visible leaders, many of whom have either criticized him or endorsed other candidates.

“Some of them have been openly hostile to him, and others merely lukewarm in their hostility,” said John Green, a scholar with the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

If Mr. Huckabee can continue to galvanize evangelicals around his novel message while attracting other Republicans and perhaps independents, he will do more than advance his own campaign. He will also challenge the establishment of the Christian conservative political movement.

“To the extent that Governor Huckabee succeeds in advancing this new agenda that combines cultural conservatism with an economic and foreign affairs populism,” Mr. Green said, “it could undermine the existing Christian conservative political leaders and their organizations.”

You might be thinking, "Why not Catholics too? They seem primed for Huck's message." Well, here:

Huckabee volunteers are also working hard to court Michigan Catholics, said Jeffrey Quesnelle, a 20-year-old conservative Catholic who is now the Michigan coordinator for Huck’s Army. (The Harris brothers have signed up state coordinators in 45 states.) Among other things, Mr. Quesnelle said, volunteers have been distributing copies of articles from the Web site Catholic Online, a hub for dedicated church members, praising Mr. Huckabee’s opposition to abortion rights and his empathy for the poor as consistent with the social teachings of the church.

Mr. Huckabee’s candidacy could signal “the fall of the old ‘religious right’ and the emergence of a true populist movement which crosses the old, tired lines and labels,” a Catholic Online column recently said.

Here's more from that Catholic Online column, by Deacon Keith Fournier, who seems rather sympathetic to the man from Arkansas. He's writing about the sort of voter who is attracted to Huckabee, even though he (the voter) is not an Evangelical:

These folks place the dignity of every human person and the right to life from conception to natural death at the head of every concern. It is not a “single issue” for them but a framework through which the entire race must be seen.

They argue that without the right to life there are no other rights and that persons must always take precedence. They will never accept the idea that a society should allow the killing of it’s young in the womb and, worse yet, celebrate it as a “right” when it is wrong.

They value marriage and family as the first cell of society, the first school, first economy, first church and first mediating institution. They reject the misguided notion of “freedom” hidden behind the smiling mask of the new libertines who seek to redefine several aberrant chosen sexual lifestyles as the equivalent of marriage and then use the power of the State to enforce their new cultural revolution. Marriage is what it is to these folks and it serves the common good.

Nor will they be won over to a model of the market which forgets that it is a servant and not a master.

These folks care about those who have not experienced the benefits of the engine of freedom that is supposed to be the market economy; the poor, the marginalized, the forgotten. They see a proper role, limited though it may be, in the exercise of “good” government in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity.

They are not “anti-Government.” They believe that we are, in a real sense, “our brother’s keeper” and want to serve the common good by not only caring for their own families but reaching out in solidarity to the poor and the needy.

And look what I just found: Catholics for Huckabee. How do you say rock on in Latin?